Vacuum induced three-body delocalization in cavity quantum materials

TL;DR

This paper shows that vacuum fluctuations in a cavity can induce delocalization in a disordered three-fermion system, revealing a new mechanism for many-body delocalization driven by quantum vacuum effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel vacuum fluctuation-induced delocalization mechanism in a three-fermion system within a cavity, extending understanding of light-matter interactions in quantum materials.

Findings

Vacuum fluctuations cause delocalization in a three-fermion system.

A mobility edge separates localized and delocalized eigenstates.

Mapping to a single-particle system reveals geometric hopping pathways.

Abstract

In this study, we demonstrate that the vacuum itself suffices to delocalize an Anderson insulator inside a cavity. By studying a disordered one-dimensional spinless fermion system coupled to a single photon mode describing the vacuum fluctuation, we find that even though the cavity mode does not qualitatively change the localization behavior for a single-fermion system, it indeed leads to delocalization via a vacuum fluctuation-induced correlated hopping mechanism for systems with at least three fermions. A mobility edge separating the low-energy localized eigenstates and the high-energy delocalized eigenstates has been revealed. It is shown that such a one-dimensional three-fermion system in with correlated hopping can be mapped to a single-particle system with hopping along the face diagonals in a three dimensional lattice. The effect of the dissipation as well as a many-body generalization have also been discussed.